An international development team has announced the first official release of ProjectPier. Based on widely accepted technologies like PHP and MySQL, ProjectPier offers an open source collaboration solution that can be installed on any shared hosting server within minutes.

Unlike other project management or extranet solutions, ProjectPier focuses on basic but powerful concepts like messages, tasks, milestones, and files rather than Gantt charts or similar tools. These basic concepts are enhanced with smart notification, tagging and commenting features offering a real Web 2.0 user experience. As a result, ProjectPier is an easy-to-use collaboration environment that needs virtually no training even for unexperienced users.

Following a multi-client/multi-project approach, ProjectPier can not only manage a single project but is ideal for small-l and medium-size companies and communities with a significant number of projects and project members. It allows an unlimited number of projects, clients, users and any other object. A three-level rights management makes sure that every user sees and does only what he is meant to see or do. Currently the software is available in more than a dozen languages.

With its focus on usability, ProjectPier may be compared with commercial software like Basecamp or ActiveCollab. As a matter of fact, its code base was forked out from an earlier version of ActiveCollab when it was still an open source project. While respecting the initial work of ActiveCollab developer Ilija Studen, a team around Jon DeGenova decided to proceed with the open source project when Studen announced he was making his next release commercial software. The current release 0.8 of ProjectPier is a slightly improved and rebranded version of ActiveCollab 0.7.1 (which can be upgraded to ProjectPier 0.8).

ProjectPier has been released under the Honest Public Licence (HPL) and can be downloaded free of charge from www.projectpier.org.